Mozilla Says no to iOS Firefox App Due to Apple's Restrictions

CNET reports that during a talk at SXSW, Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of product, said that the company has no plans to release an iOS version of Firefox because of technological limitations imposed by Apple.

The nonprofit Mozilla, which pulled Mozilla Firefox Home from Apple's App Store in September 2012, is not currently building a version of its Firefox browser for iOS, nor does the company plan to, said Sullivan, speaking on a mobile browser wars panel at South by Southwest Interactive moderated by CNET Senior Reporter Seth Rosenblatt.

The sticking point for Mozilla is not being able to carry over its sophisticated rendering and javascript engines to iOS. Essentially, the organization doesn't feel like it can build the browser it wants to for Apple's platform, Sullivan told CNET.

Mozilla's stance on a Firefox browser for the iPhone is not new. In 2010, the company announced that it did not plan to create a standalone browser for the iPhone, citing the same technical and logistical restrictions that would prevent the company from creating an acceptable mobile experience via iOS.

Apple's Safari uses the speedy Nitro JavaScript engine exclusively, while restricting third-party browsers to UIWebView, which gives Safari a significant performance boost over other browsers.

Mozilla did create an iOS application called Firefox Home, which allowed Firefox users to sync Firefox history and bookmarks with a Webkit-powered web viewer.

The company also experimented with a stripped down version of Firefox called "Junior," which was designed to simplify the iOS browsing experience. That project has yet to see a public release, and Mozilla ended up removing Firefox Home from the App Store in September.

Other major players continue to compete with Safari, despite the imposed limitations. Opera has long had the Opera Mini browser in the App Store, and Google released a Chrome app for iOS last summer. [MacRumors]

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Mozilla Firefox 19 is Out With a Bunch of New Features! Download Links Here

Mozilla has just released Firefox 19 for users of the Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems, and among a plethora of new features comes an in-built PDF viewer. Since increasing its release schedule, Mozilla has stuck almost religiously to its six-week cycles, and although it’s rare – in software terms – to see a whole number update pertaining to only a few minor changes, it helps Mozilla keep up with Google’s rampant Chrome browser.

As well as the PDF viewer, which was perhaps long overdue given its presence in the majority of other Web-surfing clients, Firefox 19 brings startup performance improvements at user level. If you’re a developer, there are several significant alterations: the Remote Web Console is available for connecting to Firefox on Android or Firefox OS, for example. The Firefox OS reflects the mobile iterations of Ubuntu in that a predominantly desktop-based company is hitting the smartphone scene, and from what we’ve seen and heard so far, it looks promising indeed, so if you wish to attune yourself with Firefox OS at this early stage, you’ll want this new Firefox update.

There are a bunch of bug fixes also included in this release, such as the issue where starting Firefox with -private flag was wrongly claiming the user was not in Private Browsing mode.

At this point in time, the new version is live on the official Firefox site. However, if you’re on an older version of Firefox, 18 for example, then you should get the update over the air, in the background, and you’ll be up to speed in a matter of minutes.

If you don’t see the update yet, then don’t panic, Firefox 19 will appear on the official site over at Firefox.com once it has propagated worldwide, and if you prefer, you’ll be able to update using the in-app update feature, as mentioned earlier.

After playing around with the final build for a while, we have to say that Mozilla is definitely making a lot of improvements as time is progressing. We’re expecting bigger and stronger features to make their debut in the upcoming versions of Firefox.

Apart from the desktop version of Firefox, the Android version has also been updated, and now supports themes and the processor requirement has been lowered from 800 to 600MHz. The update can be grabbed from the Play Store. [RedmondPie]

Download Mozilla Firefox 19

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